Brian Schneider

Brian was born and raised in New York City. He began his lighting career with his high school plays. Afterward, Brian worked in Off- Broadway theaters while attending Bard College, where he graduated with a BFA in Film.

Brian’s career is compiled of varied experience. He provided lighting for numerous theaters and museums, including the HERE Arts Center, Sotheby’s, Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, American Museum of Natural History, the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis, TN and the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC.

Upon moving to Lafayette, Louisiana in 2011, Brian accepted the position of Technical Director for the Acadiana Center for the Arts. In 2015 Brian started his own lighting design firm, Footcandle Lighting and Electric. As a licensed and bonded electrician, he can offer turn key solutions covering both design and installation. Now Brian is involved in several residential and landscape lighting projects. He loves working with the people of South Louisiana, and integrating Louisiana’s culture and point of view, with his personal style.

Kelly Clayton

Kelly Clayton moved home to Louisiana after 20 years living in New York City. Cypress trees, and swamps called to her in dreams; the kind of dreams one can smell and feel.

While in New York City, Kelly studied Sanford Meisner Technique with Ron Stetson, of The Neighborhood Playhouse. Served as Assistant Director for A Dead Man’s Apartment, by Edward Allen Baker, a one act play, Ensemble Studio Theater Marathon.

Kelly’s poetry has been published by, among others: Future Cycle Press, Delacorte Press, and China Grove Press. She is a VONA/ Voices, Hedgebrook Alumnae, and was awarded the 2014 Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change Award.

Kelly teaches poetry and creative writing workshops in Louisiana public and private schools, as well as to homeschoolers. She creates and facilitates writing classes for The Lafayette Juvenile Detention Center, and to groups of recently incarcerated adults.

Learn More About Their Upcoming Residency: Dancing with Aurora Borealis

Residency at the Center began in 2012 and has hosted ten local artists in the development of original work in visual, performing and media-driven disciplines.

What is an Artist in Residence Program?

AcA’s residency program helps to build and strengthen the creative community where artists are in residence for three to six months at a time. The program is structured to offer support through rehearsal space, along with administrative and technical assistance. Artists in residence build and develop original work under the guidance, assistance and framework of AcA’s residency program.

Why is a Residency Program important in Acadiana?

AcA values art making as an essential component of a vibrant, engaged and healthy community. The residency program strives to offer our local artists a platform to develop original work and to engage our audiences in a public dialogue on the value of contemporary art making.

Who are these artists? What have they created?

Xibipììo — Gina Hanchey

Dance

A contemporary ballet exploring the experience of transitions, both as individuals and as a collective, within boundaries we can and cannot see, asserting that we are what we know.

The Story of Christopher Jenkins—Keaton Smith

Film

The Story of Christopher Jenkins, is a live audio/visual performance combining the immediacy of mixing video with recorded footage to create an original story about a young man struggling with mental illness.

The work examines the protagonist’s fragmented thought, memory, and delusions. In an attempt to cure Christopher Jenkins, a pair of psychiatrists use a machine to extract images from his mind. The elliptical and sprawling scenery is processed and guided toward clarity, if only temporarily.

Acadiana Center for the Arts is home to a 9ft Yamaha CFX. A grand concert piano, valued at $180,000, it is a character that requires delicate attention on a consistent basis. Sam Whitmire, a local piano guru and technician, partnered with Ace Ugai, a top technician from Yamaha Artist Services in Tokyo, recently spent time with our piano to tune it. Accompanied by Raymond Goodman of Lafayette Music Company, Ugai shared tips and his experience working as a piano technician. Acadiana Center for the Arts was delighted to have Ace Ugai in our space to pay mindful attention to such a prized possession.We are consistently humbled by artist’s capabilities and were none the less inspired by the passion in understanding how these incredible instruments work.

From Quebec to New Orleans and many places far and in-between, Erik West Millette of multimedia group, West Trainz, knows the importance of seeing where you come from. Millette, who has dedicated his life’s work to West Trainz, began the project while traveling by train exploring his family’s roots; roots that would lead him to no other place than New Orleans, Louisiana.

Harry West, Millette’s great grandfather, was from New Orleans. In the 1920s Harry West traveled by train through Chicago, Canada, and New York, eventually settling in Québec City. Growing up, Millette would hear stories of life on the rails and so began his fascination for trains. Traveling and discovering his heritage, trains became Millette’s place of solitude, and the sounds became the music to which he lived his life. Millette began recording train sounds, sculpting instruments, and making music that pays homage to great mythic train lines.

While Millette couldn’t put a number on the many miles he has traveled on trains in his life, he can say that those miles lead him back to his roots in Louisiana. Millette had the opportunity to travel and make music with New Orleans native and soul musician, Willie West. Together, they created music that embodied the spiritual feeling of New Orleans, creating the perfect balance of blues, funk and soul, calling it “New Orleans Funk Train.”

West Trainz tells the story of tunes around the world and above all is a tribute to the major transcontinental express trains. It exemplifies culture, travel, and the quest for roots. It is influenced by great musicians like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and is unique in a way that festival patrons will understand and appreciate.

Kick off Festival International de Louisiane with West Trainz April 19th and 20th, 7:30pm, at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

David was many things: a fabulous songwriter and lyricist, an incredible pianist and, with his rumbling, low, baritone voice, an inspiring singer. He was a dedicated father and husband and a passionate anti-smoking advocate. He was a powerful, life-long presence in the South Louisiana music community.

To those of us who knew him and worked with him – he was first and foremost a real and true friend. He was someone you could count and rely on; someone you knew would always pull through, deliver a great show, and make the performance memorable. He was a person who would find a way to tell you the truth, even if you weren’t quite ready for it, and he would do so in his hulking, genteel, charming and diplomatic way…making hard truths much more palatable.

David was a musical force. He helped create and revitalize entire chapters of South Louisiana music. He wrote for and worked with a long list of musical All-Stars. His songwriting was as honest and powerful as he was. Through his passing we have lost not only a great musical force, but also a spirit that held us all to a higher standard, and a colleague who raised the bar and made us better performers, presenters and collaborators.

I find some solace in the fact that, while we have lost a giant, the other side has gained some of the finest, brawniest and most soulful singing for all time to come.

It’s been our mission to find work that is undeniably beautiful and that allows people to find passion, belief, and escape through artistic forms. Through the BODYTRAFFIC Residency at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, expectations were far exceeded.

Serving as a breakthrough for dance in the Acadiana area, BODYTRAFFIC served the community through a beautiful performance and by interacting with residents through various outreach projects. From teaching three master classes to visiting Prairie Elementary School and the Miles Perret Cancer Center, the company was immersed in culture and felt what it is to be a part of Acadiana.

After building relationships through outreach projects, Tina FinkelmanBerkett, Artistic Director of BODYTRAFFIC, expressed how powerful and personal it was to perform and recognize many of the faces in the crowd. She mentioned that the energy was different; more personal; and that the dancers could feel that on stage.

BODYTRAFFIC’s tour stop in Lafayette proved to be not only a performance, but also an immersion of culture and a precursor for change in the local dance community. The company was impacted by southern hospitality, community connection, and passion for art in all forms. The Acadiana Center for the Arts could not be more grateful for BODYTRAFFIC’s professionalism and level of engagement as stewards in our city, and we look forward to hosting the company again in the future.

Choreographic works of Barak Marshall, Victor Quijada, and Richard Siegalhave instilled inspiration, passion, and undeniable emotion in the professional dancers of BODYTRAFFIC. This week, throughout BODYTRAFFIC’s residency in Lafayette, the unique energy and spirit of this organization was felt through multiple outreach projects.

BODYTRAFFIC hosted three master classes for aspiring dancers and visited a PACE 2nd grade classroom of students at Prairie Elementary, but their passion for movement and self-awareness was felt in the purest form when the organization hosted a movement therapy class for patients of the Miles Perret Cancer Center.

BODYTRAFFIC, in conjunction with Clare Cook, founder of Lafayette’s Clare Cook Dance Theater, provided patients of all ages with more than a dance class. Through physical expression, human touch, and release of emotional movement, the experience provided the patients a time to see through the fog of illness and be present in a lively and zealous occasion. For a few moments, there was no talk of illness or chemotherapy, no feelings of fight or exhaustion, no whisper of the word cancer; only positive, healing, emotionally present human beings enjoying one of the most simple things in life that can be taken for granted: movement.